Maka

Video-led fashion and beauty shopping app

🇳🇬 Nigeria 🇬🇭 Ghana E-commerce & RetailDormant

Epitaph

“Here lies MAKA. Jumia Ghana's first chief executive built a live video shopping app for fashion and beauty and raised $2.65m in December 2023. Nothing was published after it. The livestream ended, and its lead investor quietly took the company off the portfolio page.”

Overview

Born: 2021 (Year)
Died: December 2023 (Month)
Lifespan: 3 years
Fate: Dormant
Headquarters: 🇳🇬 Nigeria
Category: E-commerce & Retail
Stage at death: Pre-seed
Primary cause: Unknown

Death certificate

Timeline

2021MAKA founded
Diana Owusu-Kyereko, formerly Jumia Ghana's first CEO, starts the fashion and beauty commerce app; Onome Uwhuba is co-founder and COO.
December 2023Traction disclosed
Coverage of the round reports 500,000+ downloads and 2,000+ user-generated video reviews in two months.
13 December 2023$2.65M pre-seed announced
4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital co-lead, with Palm Drive Capital, Jonathan Shipman and Wolt executives participating; funds are earmarked for hiring and for growth in Nigeria and Ghana.
1 August 2026Domain no longer resolves
Google Public DNS returns SERVFAIL for makalive.com, its authoritative nameservers refusing queries.

Autopsy report

Why did Maka shut down?

MAKA was a social-commerce app for fashion and beauty, founded in 2021 and headquartered in Lagos with operations in Nigeria and Ghana. It was led by Diana Owusu-Kyereko, previously the first CEO of Jumia Ghana and chief commercial officer of Jumia Kenya, with Onome Uwhuba as co-founder and COO. On 13 December 2023 it announced a $2.65 million pre-seed co-led by 4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital. No reporting on how or when the company ended could be found; the last coverage located dates from December 2023, and its makalive.com domain no longer resolves in DNS.

What Maka attempted

An app that tried to make African online fashion and beauty shopping look like social media rather than a catalogue. Creators ran livestreams and posted on-demand video, including live try-on hauls, and shoppers bought from the stream, the video or a conventional catalogue. Two problems were being addressed at once: giving African creators a way to monetise influence directly, and building enough trust in fit, quality and authenticity through video and user-generated reviews that people would buy clothes and cosmetics online. Product recommendations were pitched as tailored to a shopper's personal style.

What worked

MAKA raised a $2.65 million pre-seed announced on 13 December 2023, co-led by 4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital, with Palm Drive Capital, angel investor Jonathan Shipman (founder of EVP and a Twitch founding member) and executives from the delivery platform Wolt participating; StartupList Africa additionally lists Golden Palm Investments as a backer. Coverage of the round reported more than 500,000 app downloads since launch (Disrupt Africa put the figure at over 550,000) and more than 2,000 user-generated video reviews created within two months of introducing the UGC model. The company was run by a founder with unusual sector credibility: Diana Owusu-Kyereko had been Jumia Ghana's first CEO.

What happened

Three new checkable facts, all on 2 August 2026. (1) makalive.com is gone at the DNS layer, not merely offline: its four delegated Amazon Route 53 nameservers answer REFUSED (Google Public DNS extended error 23, 'lame delegation'), which is what happens when the hosted zone is deleted while the delegation is left behind, and a fetch of any path under the host fails outright with 'Name or service not known'. (2) MAKA has been removed from, or was never added to, the portfolio page of 4DX Ventures, which co-led the round: the page lists 52 companies including several that have been acquired, and MAKA is not among them; Janngo Capital's investments page likewise names no portfolio companies at all and does not mention MAKA. (3) No Android listing survives: neither Google Play nor APKPure returns a MAKA fashion/beauty live-shopping app. Every publication search re-run in this pass returns only the December 2023 funding story and nothing after it.

Lessons for future builders

A pre-seed announcement is the start of the work, not proof of it, and MAKA's raise is the last thing anyone published about it. Half a million downloads counts for nothing if the round buys hiring plans before it buys evidence that people come back.